Targeted advertising is the selection of video advertisements for insertion into scheduled television programming in such a manner as to match the advertisement to an individual viewers' interest profile.
Advertising is an important revenue source to offset the cost borne by service providers in delivering increasingly sophisticated on demand and scheduled network programming to their television viewers. Insertion of advertisements into breaks in network programming is the typical means that service providers use to earn such revenue.
However, existing approaches for ad insertion do not provide sufficient granularity for tailoring advertisements to the specific tastes and preferences of viewers. The same ad is inserted over a large population of viewers regardless of detailed geographic, demographic or psychographic information.